“THE ATTRACTION OF MODI AS PM IN PARTIS THAT HE IS NOT CORRUPT”
Every election seems historic, says Lloyd Rudolph, who has been observing India since 1952 with wife and colleague Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. The 86-year-old political scientist believes Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi has turned the ongoing election into a presidential mandate. “But the problem is, for him to become prime minister, the BJP has to get enough seats in Parliament,” he points out. That, he says, will depend on how India votes, especially a new, younger, media-sensitive citizen. In India to receive his Padma Bhushan and to inaugurate an academic centre set up by alma mater University of Chicago, Lloyd Rudolph has been one half of a couple that has trained at least 40 PhDs over the years. His hands may shake a bit, his eyes may be a little rheumy, but his voice is as direct as ever. The first to indicate at length why caste could be used as a tool of political mobilisation and how politics in India is marked by the persistence of centrism, Lloyd Rudolph is in the midst of finalising the couple’s ninth book on India, Destination India: From London Overland to India and What We Learned There. Excerpts from an interview with Editor KAVEREE BAMZAI. Q. What do you think of these elections? Three things are happening—the decline of a dynasty, there’s the rise of an individual and there’s the emergence of a new, maybe not terribly well informed but empowered citizen. A. I would add one more and that is the rise of the regional parties. That’s part of what’s at play during this election and we don’t fully know what that’s going to mean in terms of seats. We have written a number of times about the rise of regional parties, vote share of the regional parties and outcome of the parliamentary elections. The rise of the regional parties is paralleled by the decline of the national parties. Now Modi’s going to help the BJP a lot but he’s not going to help that much in terms of this balance between the regional parties and national parties. It seems very likely that the BJP will have the most seats but they’re going to have to deal with regional parties. That is a complicated subject. There’s Naveen Patnaik in Odisha, both DMK and AIADMK, and then how about Nitish Kumar in Bihar. He is a former BJP ally. At one time, a year or two ago, he said no Narendra Modi, but now he’s giving softer signals. He may get a significant number of seats but he’s not going to be an enthusiast. Q. Mamata Banerjee can’t be an enthusiast either because she has a large Muslim population in West Bengal. A. Absolutely not. She’s against the Congress but she’s not going to be very happy about Modi. Also, I am saying Modi has some trouble within his own party which he’s going to have to deal with. Finding coalition partners among regional parties is not going to be that easy either. There’s no pre-election coalition. Akali Dal is aligned with the BJP, but with Shiv Sena, one day they’re happy with the BJP and the next they’re not. They’re very volatile. Q. Do you see the rise of the regional parties as a positive or a regressive force? A. I see it as increasingly problematic because unless you have one of the national parties capable of getting a majority of seats and being asked to form a government, you are moving towards an Italian model—shouldn’t say that. It weakens parliamentary government because it’s very hard to have a government that is decisive. We can see what’s happening. Parliament is sitting for fewer and fewer days. Parliamentary government is at least in a temporary decline, not being able to do its work effectively. Q. What is your opinion on the emerging vote banks? Do you think traditional constituencies are in terminal decline? A. The new demographics are playing a role. This reduces the role of previous dominant players. It’s hard to know how much this will affect the votes and seats in the parliament. One reason why Barack Obama did so well is he got a big share of votes from women, young people, the Hispanic community and the Blacks. I think in America this can affect the presidential vote whereas in India you’ve got to go seat by seat. The structure of a presidential election and the structure of a seat-byseat parliamentary election makes the demographic somewhat attenuating. It’s a different narrative. Q. Do you see hope for India? Right now there is a tremendous crisis of credibility of the government especially? A. This election is historic in the sense that it can repair India’s sense of its competence, its mission and its capacity as the world’s
“MODI IS PRESENTING HIMSELFAS A CENTRIST. THERE ARE ASPECTS OF NATIONALIST HISTORY HE IS TRYING TO IDENTIFY WITH. HE IS TRYING TO SHED HIS COMMUNAL IMAGE.”
largest democracy built over decades. What India has done and is still doing is handling diversity in a wide sense. There is a lot of violence. We haven’t really talked about the ongoing Maoist violence. In the foreground is the elections and in the background is the Maoist violence. Q. The biggest sense Indians have right now is that they want a government that works. A. There’s an old phrase in fascist times—Mussolini made the trains run on time and so people think Modi might make the trains run on time. Q. Most of India was not born during the Emergency, they have no memory of any anti-democratic forces. A. There you are. India has had the Emergency and realised that authoritarian government didn’t work. But you can think of it as an inoculation that has run its course. So the Emergency was an inoculation against the romance of authoritarian rule. But it has run its course. Q. What are the big ideas that you want to see the new government addressing? A. One thing I see is that education is in a shambles and there’s an increasing turn towards private education. Poor people are paying for their children’s education because the state schools are, for a variety of reasons, not functioning properly. The new act, Right to Education, hasn’t really worked. Health is another problem. Nitish Kumar has moved in a direction away from caste and towards governance. We need more of that. He also cleaned up law and order and put people in jail. Bihar has begun to grow fast. So if there’s a Gujarat model, there’s also the Bihar model. When I say infrastructure, what do I mean? I mean the power system, the road system. They still haven’t got this tax system going where you have a uniform sales tax in the country. These are big things to make the economy work. Foreign investment, domestic investment, these are all important thingsbut having enough power, having roads, having a uniform sales tax helps the country. Q. What, to you, is the kind of governance India needs? A. In the old days, in the beginning, there was Jawaharlal Nehru. In a way India inherited the idea of sarkar which had some respect. But now people are making careers and incomes out of governments. That’s the corruption issue. The attraction of Modi as PM in part is that he is not corrupt. His government in Gujarat isn’t corrupt. I don’t know how much people are voting for him for not being corrupt. They’re also voting for him because Gujarat has grown and has probably better infrastructure. Why do all the big houses, the capitalists love him? Because he makes it easy for them to make money but he also runs a state that works. So the question is how much, in terms of the election and the voters, which one of these things is going to matter most. Q. Do you think your theory of the persistence of centrism works? A. Absolutely. Look at the scrambling for the centre. Modi is presenting himself as a centrist. There are aspects of nationalist history he is trying to identify with. He is trying to shed his communal image. To think how the BJP started, as the party that stood only for Ram Janmabhoomi, for uniform civil code and Article 370. That extremism was junked with Atal Bihari Vajpayee.